Insurance is a useful product for mitigating risk, so accident insurance could be a very constructive concept (protecting against accidental injuries, broken arms, falls, car crashes, etc.). However, health problems are not a risk; they are a guarantee with probability approaching one as you age. The whole point of insurance is that you mitigate risk by paying more than you take out on average, but that doesn't make sense for healthcare, where almost everyone ends up going over their limit near the end of their lives.
If we didn't have all of these subsidies everywhere and inflated demand from Medicare/Medicaid/restrictive occupational licensing/FDA-granted monopolies/ACA, then perhaps we could pay everything out of pocket, which would make a lot more sense.
There are big problems with running the whole system using insurance, of course. It's fairly easy to predict future costs for a lot of people. Given free reign, insurers will charge completely unaffordable premiums to those people, effectively excluding them from the system. You see the same thing with other types of insurance: if you have a horrible driving record, or if your house is in an area that gets a devastating hurricane every ten years, your premiums will be huge. The difference is that those are optional activities, and if you can't afford the premiums then you can walk, bike, hitch a ride, buy a different house, etc. A sick person can't switch to a healthy body.
That's why the ACA has the mandate. If you require everyone to pay in, then you can also require insurers to ignore certain predictors of future risk when determining premiums.
Fundamentally, there are only two choices. One choice is to have lots of people dying of easily treated conditions because they can't afford the treatment, and the other choice is to have government step in and socialize the system to some extent. The system was already socialized before the ACA with the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, which requires hospital emergency rooms to treat all patients regardless of ability to pay. This was horribly inefficient, of course, but that's how it was.
So: choose your poison. If you think the advantages of going full free market in health care outweigh having poor people die of easily treatable diseases, then that's a valid opinion, but you should acknowledge the negative consequences. If you want poor people to be able to obtain treatment, then you'll need to accept some interference, the only question is how you'd like to have it be structured.
Edit: rather than "poor people," I really should say "people whom the hospital thinks are poor." If you get beaten up and mugged and left for dead, the ER won't know if you have money, and might decide not to take the risk. There are good reasons for even a selfish wealthy person to want some form of universal treatment.
That said, while in some sense "health problems" are guaranteed, the range of costs involved is huge.
It's quite possible that your health insurance could be limited at first, and grows to cover more things and higher dollar amounts.
And before anyone says you can't do this, go look at your dental insurance. Odds are that your coverage increases each year so long as you have two checkups annually and don't let a lapse of insurance occur.
Note that as the ACA is __currently__ written, the situation the OP states probably exists.
Young people, and especially young, healthy people are the ones subsidizing the elderly and the unhealthy, including most of those who are unhealthy by choice through poor decisions.
> The point of insurance is to distribute risk
Perverse incentives. Insurance needs to be structured in such a way as to incentivize people to take part in preventive care, which costs a fraction of treatment and palliative care.
And before you reject that notion, try asking someone from one of those other industrialized countries if they'd like to swap their system for ours.
